The Republican River, named for the Kitkehahki, or Republican band, of the Pawnee tribe, wanders south of Franklin, NE, the town where my grandparents and parents lived from the 1940s through the 1970s. Although I never heard them mention the deluge of 1935, now known as Nebraska’s Deadliest Flood, I learned of it as I researched that region for my first novel, The Darkwater Liar’s Account. I mention the river in that book, but its role is tame in Bridget’s 1960s narrative. For a video glimpse of the Republican River’s calm waters, see that novel’s book trailer.

In 1935, in the Republican River Valley of southern Nebraska, many people were barely scraping by. The national economic depression, so intense as to be capitalized to the Depression, took its toll. Jobs were scarce and drifters knocked on doors, begging. Farmers couldn’t get a break; rain fell only sporadically, drought scorched crops, grasshopper plagues devastated what did grow and dust storms carried off topsoil. Few had the means or equipment to irrigate, in Nebraska.

In the midst of the Dust Bowl, who could imagine the vast quantity of water that would soon come their way, in Nebraska’s deadliest flood? Who could anticipate the devastation such an ordinarily peaceful river, the Republican, could bring?

The Republican River near Franklin, NE, 2014

And who could warn them? Public communication was limited in little river towns in the 1930s. While radio programming was a big deal in the cities, radios and telephones were considered luxuries, even a waste of money, for many rural Nebraskans. Many country homes weren’t yet tied to electrical service and relied on generators and battery power for lights, radios and telephones, if they had them. “Waste not, want not” applied to treasured electricity, as it did to other commodities and daily goods, during the Depression. Leaving a radio on to hear breaking news would have been almost unheard-of. Trains brought in newspapers for national news, and local presses did their best to keep up with world news.

Nebraska’s small communities came together, though, in ways we’ve almost forgotten. News could travel fast over back fences and on Main Streets. Church and social gatherings pulled people together, and gossip was a means of sharing and rehashing not only scandal, but also politics, national and international news. Newspapers ruled the information domain, in the 1930s. Rural customers with telephones usually had party lines, where the customer would listen for his or her number of rings, to answer . . . or to listen in on the other customers’ calls. In emergencies, the operator could ring through to these fortunate few, and telephone switchboard operators proved themselves heroes in Nebraska, 1935, warning many of the oncoming disaster.

Yet, weather information was scarce, and forecasting still in its infancy. The Weather Bureau in the early 1930s began to replace its weather-tracking kites with airplanes, to gather weather data, particularly in tracking cold- and warm-air masses. For the average person on the Great Plains, the impending weather was rarely forecast with any real accuracy. What was known or could be guessed at from widely-spaced weather stations and basic weather maps, was only sporadically communicated to the average citizen. While today we can track oncoming weather with radar, tune in to special weather television broadcasts, receive alerts on our mobile phones, and even send instant messages to those in the weather’s way, in 1935, most people were at the mercy of the elements.

May of 1935 was a wet month along the Front Range in Colorado. Over that Memorial Day, then commonly known as Decoration Day and celebrated on Thursday, May 30, the rainfall increased dramatically. What became Colorado Spring’s catastrophe, its own Memorial Day Flood, seems now to have been not only a tragedy there, but also a herald of an unfolding disaster on the Great Plains. Those heavy thunderstorm systems moved east across the high desert, down into Nebraska and Kansas. (You may read a brief intro to that Colorado Springs flood here.)

Kansas Department of Agriculture Republican flood basin map

The Republican River tributaries and river basin span parts of eastern Colorado, southern Nebraska and northern Kansas. The catastrophic storm that moved east on Decoration Day, 1935, dumped 24 inches of rain in one day and followed a nearly-perfect course for disaster, flooding those tributaries—the Arikaree, Frenchman, Blackwood, Beaver, Buffalo, Red Willow and Sappa Creeks, to name several. As the water gushed into the North and South Forks of the Republican, it created a wave of destruction that spanned three states and took weeks to ebb, defying prediction or belief. Given the forecasting and communication limitations of the day, and no flood control established along the river course, tragedy ensued.

For a back-in-the-day newspaper account of the concurrent flood and tornado events, you may find it interesting to read this special edition published by the Omaha World-Herald in June, 1935, scanned and offered online, courtesy of the NOAA. The photos are fascinating.

A glimpse of the Omaha World Herald souvenir Flood Edition, from weather.gov

It was eighty years ago, this week, that the skies ripped open and the Republican River broke free of its banks, as the Pawnee had tried to warn the early settlers it had previously done. In their oral history, they recalled that tame-looking water source to have risen so high, it spread from bluff to bluff. They camped on high ground and warned the first settlers away from the river bottom, but the water seemed so peaceful, and the soil so fertile there . . .

History, as it proves it will, repeated itself. In the last days of May and into June, 1935, the Republican raged, cresting twice in a few days. It took 113 human lives, killed tens of thousands of cattle and other livestock, destroyed homes, farms, businesses and crops, and coiled railroad iron like barbed wire. It washed out over 300 miles of roads and over 300 bridges, effectively isolating whole towns from the outside world for weeks, even months. The river in some places spread between one and two miles wide.

The Republican River Valley flood of 1935 precipitates a crisis in my novels-in-process. I’ve heavily researched the flood, delving into personal accounts, newspapers, local histories and weather analyses. I’ve driven and walked along much of the river’s course, from Kansas to Colorado, and it’s hard to believe, standing beside its gentle current, that it could have ever had such destructive power. It’s easy to see why the settlers were skeptical, and today it’s even easier to underestimate that river. There’s a reservoir in Harlan County, begun in 1946 and completed in the 1950s, that’s meant to tame the Republican. That dam is designed to hold back the water, to keep it in our grasp.

I have my doubts about that, doubts steeped in history and Native wisdom. The land under us, its rivers and the weather that swirls overhead, these are beyond our measurement, reckoning and control. We do our best to predict and direct our activities in line with the environment, but the earth holds us, not the other way around.

It’s something worth remembering, during this Memorial Day week, how small we are here on our planet, and how deep are the places we inhabit. To survive, we do well to walk humbly and embrace the history, stories, wisdom and community that preceded, surround and root us.

Women weren’t specifically encouraged to “Go West” as pioneers in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, but many did, nonetheless. They went as single women, wives, entrepreneurs, investors, farmers and ranchers, including and beyond the stereotypes of madams and soiled doves. (Hollywood’s John Wayne in his Western characters never met most of those women, but if he had, he may have been delighted and a bit intimidated by their strength and spirit.) Some of their genetic and spiritual great-granddaughters, Women Writing the West, gathered in mid-October in Golden, Colorado, at The Golden Hotel and The Table Mountain Inn. I was delighted to join them as a new member. We came not to pan gold or rope steers or run hotels, and not even to brew beer (a nod to Coors, at home in Golden), but to consider what it means to write the history and experience of the West.

Women Writing the West is a nonprofit association of publishers and writers who set down the Western North American experience via journalism, nonfiction articles and books, screenplays, mass media and children’s literature. They write contemporary, literary, historical and romance novels, short stories, and poems, but these categories only begin to describe their artistic ventures. This year was the twentieth anniversary of the organization, and many Founding Members were present for special honors.

This autumn, Golden beckoned farmers, scientists, ranchers, teachers, and even businesswomen, from Canada, Alaska, South Dakota, Virginia, California, Oregon, New York, Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, New Mexico…well, you get the idea. The West lives everywhere.

Key conference speakers included Sandra Dallas, Susan Wittig Albert and Corinne Brown. Panelists led us through sessions as varied as Writing the West for Kids, Women’s Fiction, Place as Character, Self-Publishing, Trends in Publishing, Social Media and Collaboration Strategies. Mystery series author Margaret Coel led an inspiring session, My Journey with the Arapahos, that I’ll never forget. I learned so much, and came away so inspired, it’s hard to sleep at night…but I keep a notepad on the bedside table, to catch ideas.

The Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum hosted the readings by, and reception for, this year’s WILLA/LAURA awards finalists. There were beautiful quilts on display, including the one WWW members made for this 20th Anniversary celebration.

On Friday Night, we met at the American Mountaineering Center to screen a new film, The Cherokee Word for Water, about Wilma Mankiller, the late Native American activist and modern Cherokee Chief. Her husband, producer and director, Charlie Soap, film producer Kristina Kiehl, and the young star who played Wilma in the film, Kimberly Guererro, met with us for a Q & A after the screening. View the film trailer and watch for this amazing story of how a community saved itself with hard work and “gadugi,” soon showing online or in a theater near you.

While the West is a physical region and encompasses an historic era, it truly lives, as one conference writer said, as a state of mind. In the West of the imagination, anything can happen. Fortunes can be won and lost, lives are wagered on a bright future and the wealth of our nation daily expands beyond our founders’ dreams, out where the tumbleweeds roll, the buffalo snort and the silicon harbors data.

Being a woman in the West was always something special, yet usually untold. Many have heard of the Unsinkable Molly Brown, or even Baby Doe Tabor, Colorado’s Silver Queen, who lived in glitter and died in squalor. But if you want to know Grace Robertson, a teenage bride alone on the South Dakota Prairie, read Dawn Wink’s novel, Meadowlark. Karen Casey Fitzjerrell’s Forgiving Effie Beck, which just won the 2014 Will Rogers Gold Medallion Award, leads you through a mystery of a woman gone missing in 1930s Texas. To see frontier justice through a woman named Emilee, read Retribution, by Tammy Hinton, which garnered the 2014 Will Rogers Silver Medallion Award. To learn the secret of the Little House on the Prairie writing process, read Susan Wittig Albert’s A Wilder Rose, about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. For heartwarming Women’s Fiction, try Journey to Sand Castle, by Leslee Breene. If you prefer nonfiction and want to consider health, ecology and the power of connection with the natural world for healing, begin with Susan Tweit’s Walking Nature Home: A Life’s Journey. I met each of these women, and I’m saving more to write about in future posts, as I experience their work.

The highlight of the conference was the women themselves, and I basked in their warm welcome. Their voices, their love of writing and their encouragement inspire me to both live and write more deeply. As Margaret Coel put it in plainspoken Western style, “People tell you all the time what you can’t do. Don’t listen to them.”

On Sunday morning, to send us off in high style, many of us gathered for a High Tea, featuring our best historical costumes. Corinne Brown presented an amazing array of Western women characters telling their stories, deepening my appreciation for our foremothers’ sacrifices and endurance.

The great beauty of the West is in its still-to-be-explored history, changeability and multicultural fabric, reflected in and by this happy gathering of writers and publishers. Among them, this writer has claimed a new homestead.

For a pdf catalog of more great books by and about the Great Plains and West, go to this link and click on the “View the 2015 Catalog” button at mid-page. Take a leisurely walk through wild country…no cowboy boots or turquoise jewelry is required… but then again, they might get you faster service.

Fractals fascinate the eye, but their beauty is more than skin deep. Their self-similar structure iterates, meaning it repeats a process where the result forms the starting point for the next step. Their structure originates in and develops out of their geometric, mathematical formulae. While only recently acquiring their name, in 1975 from Benoit Mandelbrot, mathematicians explored related concepts in the 17th century.

In 1918, Gaston Julia published a paper on the formula for the design we now know as Julia sets. Other contributors include Sierpinski, Koch, Menger, Harter and Heighway, Before the mathematical potential of computers, however, theorists were limited in following their formulae beyond one dimension to their macro- and microscopic potential.

a series illustration of a Koch snowflake

As in so many other areas of discovery, computers have liberated mathematicians to study formulae in greater depth. Computers also permit fractals to express their nature in colors and three dimensions, beyond imagination.

My son introduced me to fractals ten years ago. (As for the frontiers of mathematics, my son and daughter have both boldly gone where I’ve never dared to go.) My attraction to fractals is artistic but their underling logic appeals to me, as well; I recognize suggestions of fractals in nature in the patterns of blood vessels, tree branches and crystals, the coil of a snail’s shell, the fronds of a fern and even in a cluster of broccoli.

a Julia set

Link here to Wikipedia’s page on fractals. Far better than I might, this page gives a broad overview of the origins, evidence and characteristics of fractals in science, creative works and nature. It also provides an abundance of links to take you beyond that page, if you dare. This Wikipedia page illustrates and animates a zoom sequence of a Mandelbrot set as it repeats. The illustrations I’ve included are in the public domain, from Wikipedia, as well.

No genius, I’m grateful for the mathematicians and computer scientists who materialize these beautiful truths for our eyes and minds to appreciate. It’s hard to look at fractals for very long without sensing that there’s something very important and true going on in their interplay of mathematics and matter. As literature is my preferred domain, for my tribute to the science, mystery and art of fractals, I quote John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

Water is the most taken-for-granted necessity of our lives, except perhaps for air. While much of the world pines for water, here in the U.S., we bottle it, spill it, spray it out of garden hoses and flush it down the drain. As long as it flows out of the tap and doesn’t back up through our sewer lines, we give it little thought.

Today, let’s change that. As a topic, water is as vast as its oceans, glaciers and atmospheric presence. I’ve spent a little time considering it as a metaphor, a scarce necessity, a molecular compound and a force of nature. Today, I present for you 7 random “drops” of water.

Gavins Point Dam, 2011

1. The Missouri River Flood of 2011, an impressive, unexpected deluge, devastated farmland, disrupted local economies and travel and destroyed many homes and barns. Fortunately, it wasn’t fatal, as were the hurricane-related floods of the South in recent years. As with most natural disasters, finding someone to blame for this one is still a priority. Some blame nature, while others lay it at the feet of bureaucrats. I believe nature can outsmart bureaucrats 99% of the time. Smart water wranglers assure us that this was a “500-year flood,” unlikely to recur soon. Smart people who rebuild on the flood plain are pouring very tall concrete foundations for their homes. See my video of Gavins Point Dam in 2011, when 160,000 cubic feet of water passed, per second.

Thales, out of the well

2.Thales of Miletus, whom Aristotle described in his Metaphysics as the founder of natural philosophy, is reported in myth to have fallen into a well while studying the stars. Aristotle also recorded that “Thales says that it is water”–meaning that according to Thales, water was the originating principle of matter.

3. A rarely-noted water behavior is sublimation, where H2O in its solid state bypasses liquidation to become a gas or vapor. During my childhood in Colorado, I learned about one such phenomenon: the Chinook wind. According to Dave Thurlow of the Mount Washington Observatory,

Chinook winds are westerlies from the Pacific whose moisture gets wrung out as it passes over the Rocky Mountains. Once these winds come down from the mountains onto the high plains, they can be quite mild and extremely dry-as warm as 60 or 70 degrees Fahrenheit — over 15 Celsius — with a relative humidity of 10% or less. The air is so dry that when it hits a snowpack, the frozen water evaporates, going directly from the ice to vapor and bypassing the liquid phase entirely.

This sublimation is not to be confused with Freud’s psychological equation: sublimation = sexual energy transformed into creative energy, which has little to do with drinking or bathing, but likely has everything to do with Freud’s mother…drinking or bathing.

Ogallala Aquifer

4. An aquifer is a soil and bedrock formation that percolates water into purity, filtering out minerals, organisms and some contaminants. Abandoned wells (Make sure you don’t have one at your place; children tend to fall into them.) bypass the aquifer and allow those bad things into the groundwater. Here is a map showing the Ogallala. It’s very shallow, but one of the largest in the world.

5. Digging a well by hand is very hard work and this video demonstrates how it’s done in most parts of the world. Thanks to ghost32, whatever your real name, for this video of hard, thirsty work in Mexico.

Beaver by Ilyes Laszlo

6. Not only is there a Beaver Crossing Nebraska, but this village has an impressive, watery history. I lived there for less than a year, leaving against my better judgment, but holding a neighbor’s recipe for the best oatmeal cookies I ever ate. First struck in his mercantile basement by Earl Eager in the late 1800s, a gusher of an artesian well system made this village better than the average watering hole. (Did anyone else notice the fortuitous “Eager” and “Beaver” juxtaposition in this text? Of course you did.) Learn more in Mary Lanik’s history of Beaver Crossing and its wonderful wells, as well as at the first link here, in #6.

7. To the best of my knowledge, since 1866, federal water law and policy has deferred to states in the allocation and administration of water within their boundaries. Please notify me if this has changed and I will assume all blame for the error.